United States – Project Bioshield, the bioterrorism preparedness program that has produced vaccines for anthrax and Ebola, heads into its third decade expecting a threat landscape that will be vastly different from what it was initially designed to address.
The federal program was initiated in 2004 – again, after the Sept. 11 tragedy – in part due to a series of mailed anthrax attacks that took place in 2001. Its role was to improve the medicine that may be required in a chemical and biological or a nuclear and radiological attack, as reported by The Hills.
Many vaccines, tests, and treatments have since been stocked in the National Strategic Stockpile for the next twenty years.
Achievements and Progress
‘Over the past twenty years, we have supported 39 products against these threats; we have 26 [Food and Drug Administration] approvals of 22 products,’ said Gary Disbrow, director of the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA), while speaking to The Hill.
Disbrow has been an employee of BARDA since 2007 and was involved in signing the first Bioshield contract. He admitted that the program experienced some difficulty in the initial years, but this has since been addressed.
In response to a question of what he considers to be Bioshield’s greatest accomplishment, Disbrow spoke about the size, capability, and relationships with the private sector that it established.
Recent Contributions
More recently, during the mpox event, Bioshield helped facilitate the approval of the smallpox vaccine called Jynneos that was also used to prevent the spread of the mpox virus. Not only did the U. S have a stockpile of the Jynneos vaccine to assist with the mpox response domestically, but it also supported affected countries internationally.
However, as was its intended use, healthcare diplomacy has now become one of the roles played by Project Bioshield.
“The initial intent was national security, to bolster national security, but these products are available, and obviously, we will do anything we can to help our international partners,” Disbrow said.
Future Directions
While Bioshield is operating under an arm of the Department of Health and Human Services, the Department of Homeland Security looks into possible threats through material threat assessments.
Disbrow stated that changes may also be required on this page because of the program’s long history and the evolving nature of the threats posed by other nations, as reported by The Hills.
“Many of these material threat determinations were written in 2004, 2006,” Disbrow explained. “We live in a much different time now, and so we need to constantly be evaluating the threat space to make sure that we’re balancing investments that we made in [material threat determinations] that already exist and then working with the intelligence community to make sure that they’re identifying additional pathogens that potentially are a risk to national security.”